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C1_109_2014

CIGRE 2014

Predictive Modelling of Overhead Lines Reliability and Lifetime

N. PINHO DA SILVA*1, J. CASACA2, L. CAMPOS PINTO2, F. AZEVEDO3,
J. GOMES-MOTA1
1
Albatroz Engineering,
2
RENRede Elctrica Nacional,
3
CENTRIAFCTUniversidade Nova de Lisboa
Portugal
SUMMARY
The Portuguese Transmission System Operator (REN) launched a long term effort to develop a risk
based methodology for operation and maintenance to optimise the lifetime and maintenance costs of
Overhead Lines (OHL), based on asset information, inspection, maintenance and third party data. The
scope of the work considers next-day (for operation) and next-year (for maintenance) risk estimates
based on a common framework.
To estimate the reliability of each asset, the authors propose combining heterogeneous
sources, such as information from airborne inspections, dispatch event records and third party data.
Such procedures are common for switching equipment and transformers inside substations and power
plants, but it is less so on OHL that spread across wide and heterogeneous territories, and are subject
to diverse environmental factors. Therefore, the proposed probabilistic approach considers the
interaction of the OHL with its surrounding dynamic environment, i.e. the OHLs space-time context.
The methodology is discriminative regarding contingencies related to OHL outages, and this
paper presents details on the design of the reliability functions concerning lightnings, storks and
vegetation contingencies. In particular, it complies with the vegetation dynamics using a nonstationary approach. For each contingency, the intensity function of the random process is design in a
data-driven fashion.
Regarding lightning incidents, data shows that the OHL proneness is heterogeneous in both
space and time, as well as with respect to the operation voltage. Concerning the outages caused by the
storks usage of the infrastructure, data also shows a non-uniform space-time distribution, although it
can be seen that storks (themselves, not incidents) are spreading to new lines. In fact, the number of
outages related with storks has been decreasing due to RENs highly effective preventive maintenance
policies. With respect to outages related with vegetation, they are very scarce. The major reason is the
RENs right-of-way and fuel management policies, which are very efficient regarding the quality of
service criteria. This includes, for example, routine airborne inspections and time and condition based
maintenance.
Such measures have granted high quality of service on the Portuguese transmission grid: in
2013, RENs achieved 0,09 minutes of Average Interruption Time. However, to increase efficiency,
there must be a compromise between economic and quality of service criteria. Hence, this paper
presents a risk based maintenance viewpoint, with emphasis on inspections, which is deemed to
increase asset availability while decreasing costs.

KEYWORDS
Risk Based Maintenance, Risk Based Inspections, Reliability and Overhead Lines.

*npsilva@albatroz-eng.com

Introduction
Regarding the operation and maintenance of overhead lines (OHL), most infrastructure managers, on
an international scale, are sharing the same concerns and looking forward to improve environmental
integration, efficiency and risk management.
Maintenance, in particular, has taken an increasingly important role in the assets life cycle
and it is, nowadays, regarded as core for sustained improvement of quality of service (QOS). As OHL
demand for special attention, given its geographical dispersion, subject to adverse natural phenomena
and need harmonious coexistence with the natural and human ecosystems that they cross, their
inspections policy plays an important role in QOS.
In spite of the already high quality records of QOS of the Portuguese Transmission Grid
(RNT), the current context asks for a compromise between economic and QOS criteria. It promoted
the idea of changing the paradigm of the inspection activity and optimization of OHLs from a Time
Based (TBM) and Condition Based (CBM) approach towards an approach to risk and impact on the
grid (Risk Based RBM) materialized in a maintenance management tool for OHLs supported by a
model of probability of occurrence and correlation between variables and measure the impact of
incidents [1].
Rather than what is common practice in the industry, i.e., the continued implementation of
inspection and monitoring of overhead lines, for certain time periods or by identification of
disturbances in the physical condition of their equipment, a mathematical model for calculating the
risk of incidents was produced. This model is based on the specification of a map of probability of
occurrence, taking into account a set of real world scenarios that affects performance and physical
condition of OHLs. However, the scenarios concerned with, and in particular, lightning, fires,
pollution and storks, show significant variability through time, so their understanding in terms of
predicting the occurrence is a complex one. In the last five years, these four main contingencies
represent about 79% of the faults in the RNT (Figure 1).
Beyond these four main causes of incidents, there is a fifth, the vegetation/obstacles, which
despite having no expression with regard to the incidents recorded in recent years, is extremely
important in the behavior of the grid and quality of service [5].
Previous work exploited field evidence and expert knowledge [3], as well as reports from
airborne inspections [4], to built risk related indexes that allow performing selective maintenance
based on quantitative indicators. This work improves and complements [8] by focusing on the OHLs
risk models related to lightnings and storks, and introducing a new vegetation model that explicitly
accounts for the dynamics of vegetation clearance to the OHL. Moreover, it discusses possible risk
based decision making supported by these models.
The system computes a risk index for each circuit line, per month and time of day (for
operation purposes next day risk), and per year (for maintenance purposes next year risk), where
the resulting risk index is the probability of incidents, considering the causes described above,
multiplied by the impact (severity) that these potential incidents may cause in the transmission grid,
thus complying with operation and maintenance requirements in a single system. Furthermore, by
indentifying the individual root causes, this system incorporates a discriminative reliability model, that
relies on the data driven design of the hazard rate concerning each root cause, for supporting detailed
risk assessment.

Figure 1. Distribution of the RNTs incidents over contingencies in the last five years

Figure 2. The distribution of each type of maintenance currently performed at REN. Circles show present policies
and Dashed circumferences show predicted weight of each strategy within 2-3 years [8].

The Portuguese Transmission System

The maintenance activity in REN- Rede Elctrica Nacional, SA is based on the adoption of policies
and strategies that suit the required business performance of the company. The RNT has a high quality
record for reliability already, therefore it is imperative to learn the maximum from each issue.
In the past, the OHLs inspections in the Portuguese transmission grid were carried out
visually from vehicles on the ground. However, this method entailed very high costs and did not
provide an appropriate degree of accuracy, forcing the frequent operation of protection systems.
Furthermore, it did not provided any preventive warnings to forecast or schedule of maintenance work,
leading to a large dispersion of maintenance human resources by territory.
Since 2005, the Portuguese TSO has been developing an important work in terms of overhead
lines inspection regarding to the measurement of the distance from the line to the trees and other
obstacles (i.e., clearance measures), with integrated laser technology in aerial inspections. In 2007, the
routine of overhead lines inspections using thermography, video recording and measuring distances
(through LiDAR) was established. By promoting a routine of selective cutting and trimming only on
the identified critical areas, the new inspection methodology quickly demonstrated its technical and
economic benefits,.
The present scenario of the electricity sector, with ongoing deregulation and increased
competition, along with an increasingly demanding legislation on the quality of energy, imposes on
utilities, in particular to maintenance managers, the reduction of operating costs and, simultaneously,
the requirement of high levels of availability of the various elements that constitute an electricity
transmission grid. This present business environment has, of course, impact on OPEX costs as a key
component in managing the asset life cycle, and therefore, is reviewing its policies and maintenance
strategies in order to potentiate the business strategies based on asset risk (Risk-Based Maintenance).
Based on indexes of criticality it is possible for the company to optimize maintenance activity,
especially in prioritizing periodic inspections and replacement of equipment, as well as an appropriate
use of resources (technical and financial). To this purpose, the Portuguese transmission grid (RNT)
was represented by a complex and rich architecture, which attempted to reproduce the diverse
technical aspects of equipment (asset value, time-varying state, element of a physical circuit and
element of a operation topology), as well as the use of automatic tools that incorporate empirical data,
which are reflected today in the implicit knowledge of RENs technicians. Thus, REN Rede Elctrica
Nacional, S.A. moves towards a Risk Based Inspection (RBI) strategy, with geo-referenced binding
allowing an highly focused acting on the more critical points.
The chart in Figure 2 gives an idea, in a relative way, of the distribution of each type of
maintenance currently performed in REN, based on costs inherent in each type, for OHL. Represented
in green color is the present status. Are also shown (dashed) the relative values expected in a near

Figure 3. The risk assessment system follows a bottom up approach, from asset to the entire grid, or particular grid
configurations. The middle (yellow) stage is detailed here.

future (2-3 years), reflecting a progressive increase in strategies based on risk and condition, rather
than based on time.

Risk and Reliability Models

The quantitative risk assessment methodology follows a bottom up approach, from the individual
equipment and environment to the overall infrastructure, and it may be expressed in three stages
(Figure 3): (i) finding the appropriate descriptors encoding the status of equipment or environment;
(ii) building the probabilistic model with those descriptors; and (iii) computing the overall reliability
of some save case, by imposing grid constraints (e.g. topology, capacity, etc.). Here, the focus is
building probabilistic models.
Specifically, for each OHL L, the risk of an outage due to contingency c is an expectation of
severity, i.e.
(1)
where
and
are, respectively, the failure probability, and the severity, concerning OHL L and
contingency c. The probabilistic model builds upon the Poisson random process. The reliability
function relates to the event probability through
. The severity function quantifies the
consequences of circuit L outage due to contingency c. The values of severity of an OHL are generated
from 'save-cases' of RNT in the period under review. The developed method is based on algorithms of
calculations of energy flows (Newton-Raphson iterative method) determining the impacts that a
fortuitous circuit lost originates in the technical quality of service [7].
Regarding the assets reliability, the Poisson model is widely used in its analysis and
quantitative risk based approaches. The differentiating feature among methods is the design of the
process intensity and, consequently, the parameterization of the Poissons expected value.
Let
be the random variable representing the number of outages on circuit L due to
contingency c. The expected number of faults occurring in a day period p (0-6h, 6-12h, 12-18h, or 1824h) in month m (inside a one-year time range) is given by:
{

(2)

which, in the short period (operation), is a surrogate for the outages probability. Here, L,c (m,p) is the
average fault rate (per 6 hours period, per km) of line L, L,c (m,p) typically ranges from 0 to 1;
duration(m,p) is the number of periods of type p in month m, which is to say its (average) number of
days, duration(m). The parameter L,c (m,p) uses a convex combination of own (Ls) faults and faults
of all lines of the same voltage level to discriminate between operation voltages. For maintenance
purposes, the quantity in Equation (2) is aggregated in an annual expected value of incidents, used for
computing yearly reliability estimates.
To account for environmental conditions in risk assessment, for each of the contingencies
presented here, the methodology defines a corridor along the OHL as its geographical area of interest.
For the Vegetation/Obstacles contingency, the width of such corridor is naturally narrower, and the

Figure 4. Critical location of Storks nests on transmission towers (A is most critical and C is least critical).

area corresponds to a rectangular shape for each span, whereas for Storks and Lightning contingencies,
the area is comprised of all points within a certain distance of the OHL path, taken globally.

Storks
The model for Storks considers registered information about all detected stork nests in towers in a
corridor around the OHL with at most 200 m from it, which is taken as the maximum distance where
the presence of storks still represents a relevant risk indicator. Here, we distinguish own (Ls) towers
from others: in the case of an Ls tower, the location of the nest (on it) matters, according to Figure 4.
Nests over the insulators chains are the most critical. Nests located in other towers (considered
as zone D) are just a sign of possible storks region, and are the less critical. In this case, is
independent of m and p and is calculated in the following way:
(

(3)

where Towers(L) is the number of towers in the whole corridor region, and nestsX(L) is the number of
nests located on a zone X (X in {A, B, C, D}) in towers in such region.

Lightning
The model for the Lightning contingency benefits from location data provided by the Portuguese
Institute of Ocean and Atmosphere (IPMA) for all detected lightning in Portugal since 2003. Actually,
the expected number of faults is calculated based on the OHLs BackFlash rate (BFR, as faults by time
unit) as
{

(4)

Therefore, BFRL(m,p) corresponds to the

product in (2). Nevertheless, BFR
does not correspond to a direct observed fault rate, but rather it is weighted by its propensity to such
faults in comparison to other lines of the same operation voltage. Such weight is given by factor ,
which can be larger than 1 when Ls propensity is higher than average (for the same voltage). A line
Ls propensity (for lightning faults in month m, day period p), or Exposure, is given by:
(5)
where
is the number of lightning flashes in corridor given by L with a radius given by the
average attractive radius of its towers (around 150 m); and and
is its average flashover
probability based on the circuits calculated critical current Ic on each tower [2].

Figure 5. The non-homogeneous evolution of R(t) the reliability as a function of time on some class B spans from
a 220 kV OHL (see Table 1). T0 is the time of the last airborne inspection with integrated LiDAR measurements.
YGR stand for yearly growth rate. Span 4 is urban, hence ygr is null. When the forecasted clearance is below a given
threshold, the model assumes that a vegetation event happens almost surely, hence the reliability of that span is null.

U [kV]

Clearance Class Upper Bounds [m]

Class B
Class A
10
6
8
5
7
4

Class C
14
12
10

400
220
150

Table 1. RENs clearance classification. The report built from the airborne OHL inspection, with integrated LiDAR
measurements, contains a set of geo-referenced points with their corresponding clearance to the OHL and classified
according to the values on the table. REN defines three levels of clearance severity according to the feeders voltage level.
The methodology presented in this paper leverages this classification into probabilistic models for supporting risk based
decision.

Vegetation/Obstacles (V/O)
Due to the time varying nature of the clearance and the heterogeneous territories cross by OHLs, the
vegetation model drops the stationary assumption and incorporates clearance dynamics, thus
improving [8]. Hence the reliability does not vary homogeneously along time as it relies on the spans
dominant vegetation growth rate estimates and corresponding clearance dynamics (Figure 5).
There is a minimum clearance threshold below which the model assumes a vegetation event
almost surely. While the clearance is above that threshold, the hazard rate is a differentiable function
of time, as it is the conditional expectation of
- the number of incidents at span s:
{ {

}},

(6)

where
is the clearance dynamics relying on the estimated dominant vegetation growth on the
span,
is the spans length and
is an indicator of tree trimming. The methodology
leverages the Poissons canonical link to instantiate the model through maximum likelihood [6]. The
expected number of outages may be expressed as a function of month m and day period p (Equation
(2)) by
{

(7)

[ ] is a positive increasing linear function of

where
, the rate of outages in
span s observed in month m and day period p. The expected number of outages with respect to an
OHL may be given by interpreting an OHL as a serial network of electric spans or by applying nonmaxima suppression.
The model discriminates different voltage levels in two ways: by defining different minimum
clearance thresholds according to different voltages and by penalizing the response variable according
to the RENs clearance classification (Table 1). The minimum clearance threshold may also include
space-time referenced atmospheric data, such as temperature, pressure or humidity.

Table 2. Risk assessment matrix with the results for five OHLs. The three different colors represent a proposal of
differentiated inspections policy.

Other Contingencies
The models for Forest Fires and Fog/Pollution contingencies are detailed in [8] and presented here for
completeness. Recalling Equation (2), these models are specify by their
which results from
aggregating the following modulators over the municipalities (Portuguese administrative regions) mun
crossed by OHL L:
(8)
(9)
where, relating to Forest Fires,
is an exponential function of the 4-year moving average of
the FWI, obtained by performing a nonlinear regression on estimated values based on historical
relations of incidents with their FWI of the day, and
is a positive and decreasing linear
function of the area intervened due to the fuel management program; and, concerning the Fog
contingency,
is a positive and decreasing linear function of
,
the percentage of towers of OHL L that have composite insulators within municipality mun, and
is an indicator function of whether mun is, or not, prone to this sort of incidents.

Short-Term Applications of Risk Computation on the RNT Inspection Policies

At this point the practice of inspections in REN is supported in fixed periodic regimes, being all OHLs
generally, inspected every year. Supported in this methodology, it is possible to differentiate the
inspection policies based on risk. As an example, five circuits with different voltage levels, severity
degrees and fault probabilities (Table 2) were selected, using the data of severity for the months of
September, October and November 2013.
Thus, a proposal for differentiating inspection policies is presented. Splitting the matrix into
three zones of intervention (green, yellow and red), it will be possible to implement a plan of
differentiated inspections, on a risk basis (Risk Based Inspections RBI), in 2015. The green area
represents the OHLs that can have their time between inspections extended, eventually to three to four
years. In the other areas of the matrix, inspections could have frequencies of 2 to 3 years (yellow zone)
and 1 to 2 years (red zone). On the most critical cases, inspections could become even more frequent
(6 months to 1 year).
In 2015, and at a first threshold, REN expects to obtain inspection cost reductions not less than
2/3 of the current annual value, and can be further optimized depending on the differentiation
inspections policy adopted.

Conclusion
This paper presented a quantitative risk based methodology for operation and maintenance to optimise
the lifetime and maintenance costs of Overhead Lines (OHL) and discussed its application for
differentiating the inspection policies based on the OHLs risk index. It resulted from a long term
effort promoted by REN- Rede Elctrica Nacional, SA, the Portuguese TSO.
This methodology will allow the REN implement a differentiated inspection policy in the
short term (2015), based on risk, combining heterogeneous sources, such as information from airborne
inspections, dispatch event records and third party data, to design the hazard rate of each individual
root cause of an observed incident. The resulting OHL reliability model is discriminative at
contingency level. This feature allows computing discriminative risk indexes for supporting detailed
risk assessment.
As the level of complexity and richness of the developed algorithms and systems succeed
replicate conditions of maintenance management, it is expected that the performance of the system
exceeds the performance of the experts, taking full advantage of its memory capacity and mass
calculation. In the current year of 2014, all the necessary adjustments will be made, highlighting the
visualization tool, in order to make their use as simple as possible. The next step will be to extend the
risk analysis for different sections of the same OHL and to other assets of grid being directed to
determining the detrition of power transformers and protection systems, crossing with other initiatives
taken by REN aimed at preventing faults in these devices.

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